1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to survey questionnaires and methods employing such questionnaires in which the survey may be self-administered.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Systems for collecting survey information are well known in the art. Two existing alternative approaches are the paper questionnaire survey form and the computer-based survey program. In the paper-based survey approach a pre-printed list of questions is prepared. Interviewers then administer these questionnaires to respondents (for example consumers) by means of personal or telephone interviews. During this question and answer process, the interviewer manually marks the paper questionnaire, e.g. with a pencil, to indicate the responses. The information thus recorded on the questionnaire is subsequently entered into computer data files for analysis by means of key entry, commonly called key-punching. Typically such information is comprised of yes/no answers, choices from lists of research interest, and so forth. Generally, the selection of questions asked as a survey is manually administered depends on answers previously given to the interviewer by the respondent. Thus the total questionnaire form can be envisioned as a local "tree" structure in which respondents are manually taken down one or more "branches" by the interviewer, who must be carefully trained, depending on their answers to each question. There could also be sideways jumps from one branch to another, to follow this analogy, and even retracing of some paths. This progression through questions contingent on responses to other questions is reflected in what are called "skip patterns," which normally relate uniquely to a given questionnaire and require great care by the interviewer to insure an efficient interview with as little respondent burden as possible.
Nevertheless, the interview process, taking into account the desired skip patterns, the manual marking of responses on the paper forms and the subsequent key entry steps are often error prone and time consuming resulting in an undesirable respondent burden which could significantly affect the accuracy of the responses provided.
In the computer-based interview system, which is an attempt to minimize respondent burden, a computer is specially programmed to reflect the complete questionnaire, including all possible skip patterns. In such an instance, the interviewer is guided by the computerized questions appearing, for example, on a CRT terminal screen and enters the respondent's answer, in each case, back into the computer via a keyboard. The computer, having been programmed to respond in accordance with a given skip pattern for any given answer, then provides the next question to be asked on the CRT screen. The computer-based approach can be used in a personal interview situation, or in a telephone survey. In the latter case, the system is called CATI for Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing. The computer based systems provide data immediately because the interviewer, in effect, completes the data entry function. However, such prior art computer based systems still involve the manual data entry of responses and, thus, can be error prone and cumbersome. Additionally special computer programming must be completed for a survey before the actual interview process can begin. Such programming normally requires extensive effort by technical specialists, and since it must be re-done for each different kind of survey, the result is again time consuming and subject to errors. Moreover, such programs tend to be long and complex, resulting in a related requirement for larger and more expensive host hardware.
Despite the above difficulties, both paper questionnaires and computerized approaches, as discussed above, have become popular in the collection of research and survey data. For example, the use of a computerized survey approach is disclosed in commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. Re 31,951 and in U.S. Pat. No. 4,528,442 in which a prompting scenario in software resident in the hand-held computer is used for the survey as is the specific survey program for the survey being conducted. Thus, as discussed above, the questions themselves must be resident in the computer and not in a paper questionnaire, and the computer must be reprogrammed for each different survey. Similarly, prior art CRT interviewing, although embodying logic checking routines, has the intelligence of the survey built into a specific resident computer program rather than into a paper questionnaire per se. In addition, although bar coded questionnaires are well known in the art, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,203,116 and 3,820,067, by way of example, as are other bar coded identification approaches, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,676,644; 4,588,211; 4,605,846; 4,017,834; 4,358,017; and 4,586,711, there are no prior art methods or systems known to applicants in which the intelligence of the survey is built into a paper questionnaire per se in which bar code responses contain both the answers to the question being asked as well as the skip pattern to the next question to be prompted based on the selected bar code response, so that a common generic survey program can be used with a plurality of different questionnaires. Applicants' approach herein overcomes these disadvantages of the prior art and enables data to be collected from each site using a variety of questionnaires, the nature of which are not known in advance, using a common program.